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URL/META length

Phil Leblanc philanc at gmail.com

Sat Jul 4 20:17:37 BST 2020

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I read a very interesting discussion between Petite Abeille,Solderpunk, Luke Emmet 2-3 weeks ago, regarding how to upload smallcontent to Gemini servers (eg. wiki page updates, comments,...)

The idea revolves around using the URL to upload small content (orchunked content in several requests)

Petite Abeillehttps://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/001644.html

Solderpunk replyhttps://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/001672.html

and Luke Emmethttps://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/001681.html

Quoting Solderpunk:

Well, look - 1024 bytes as a maximum URL length is a value I more orless plucked out of the air without deep consideration, simply becausethe elements passed around by a protocol *should* have a well-definedmaximum length so people can allocate appropriately sized memorybuffers, etc. I certainly *wasn't* thinking about using queries toupload content, I was thinking of "ordinary URLs" and so 1024 bytesseemed hugely generous.

According to GUS, currently more than half of the text/gemini contentout there is less than 1.2 KiB in size. If URLs were allowed to be 2048bytes long, all that content could be uploaded as a query.

Can we solve a lot of these issues by bumping up our maximum URL length?

I suggest bumping the URL maximum length to 8KB.

- it allows creative uses of _mechanisms already in place_ in Gemini,- it doesn't change the definition of the protocol and protocol elements,- it doesn't impact existing clients,- the impact on existing servers is very limited (allocating a 8Kinstead of 1K buffer...), and an existing server should just refusetoo long a request.- 8K vs 1K doesn't make a difference for a client today in terms ofRAM footprint - after all, let's not forget that TLS is mandatory here;-)

What do you think?

Phil